Headlines at the World Socialist Web Site today:
1. The New York elections and the political role of the Democratic Socialists of America
Immense resources are being funneled into an expanding world war, waged by means of war crimes and genocide. The word “socialism,” which the ruling class spent the better part of a century trying to expunge from political life, has become attractive again because the existing order offers working people nothing.
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Under these conditions, a clarification of what socialism is—and what it is not—is of vital importance.
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The Times noted approvingly that the “socialist” mayor [Zohran Mamdani] “has... shown himself to be a pragmatist,” anxious to reassure the “bipartisan skeptics who doubt that a 34-year-old democratic socialist can effectively govern the financial capital of the United States.”
Anything is permissible within this framework. Since taking office in January, no doubt in the name of being “pragmatic,” Mamdani has met Trump in the Oval Office at least twice, described their relationship as “honest, direct and productive” and gone to the White House to plead for federal housing grants. Relations with a government constructing a dictatorship is dissolved into deal-making, case by case.
And what of the claim that his mayoralty already shows “what life looks like if a socialist wins”? His record answers it. Where workers have entered into struggle, he has lined up against them. He postured as a friend of the 15,000 nurses who struck the city’s hospitals in January, even as he moved with Governor Kathy Hochul to bring the strike to a close and backed the strikebreaking she authorized. When 3,500 Long Island Rail Road workers walked out in May, he promoted an emergency busing operation to weaken the strike and refused to appear on the picket line, anxious not to antagonize Hochul, on whom he depends for state funds.
Mamdani has left the multibillion-dollar police budget intact and made record-low crime—the work of the New York Police Department—the centerpiece of his record.
This is what Mamdani’s “socialism” delivers: the administration of a capitalist city.
What Mamdani presents as fresh and undogmatic is, in fact, the oldest snake oil. In the 1890s, the German social democrat Eduard Bernstein argued that capitalism had learned to master its crises and that socialism would arrive through the gradual accumulation of reforms within the existing state, compressing his outlook into a phrase that could serve as the DSA’s motto: “The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me; the movement is everything.” Rosa Luxemburg’s reply still holds. Those who choose reform “in place of and in contradistinction to the conquest of political power,” she wrote, do not take a calmer road to the same goal, but choose “a different goal:” a capitalism made marginally more bearable.
In the United States, this tradition runs through the DSA, founded by Michael Harrington on the principle that socialists should constitute “the left wing of the possible”—the word possible meaning the Democratic Party. Over the past four decades of this strategy of “realignment,” the Democrats have shifted even further to the right, towing the DSA alongside with them.
The DSA is not a workers’ party, in contrast to the mass social democratic parties from which Bernstein’s revisionism emerged. It is an organization of the upper-middle class, a faction operating within the Democratic Party.
And it offers no genuine reform program. Mamdani appeals for a return to “a New Deal understanding of what working people deserve,” a politics he laments “you can only find in history books.” But the New Deal was not the achievement of pragmatic administrators. It was wrenched from the ruling class by the upheavals of the 1930s at a time when an ascendant American capitalism could still afford concessions, even in the midst of the Great Depression, to buy social peace.
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The working class and youth who have turned toward socialism are responding to a real crisis. They are being told that this crisis is not a crisis, that nothing fundamental need change, that everything can be set right through pragmatic maneuvers within the institutions of capitalist politics and, above all, within the Democratic Party.
This is not socialism. It is the means by which the immense social anger building up in American society is to be contained, dissipated and betrayed—and in this way strengthen the far-right.
The entire character of the present situation points to the necessity of a revolutionary movement. None of the great questions confronting masses of people—global war, genocide, fascism, climate change, the dictatorship of a rapacious oligarchy—can be resolved by tinkering at the edges of the existing system. The belief that they can is a dangerous illusion. The fight for socialism is bound up with the development of a revolutionary movement in the working class.
The radicalization expressed in the New York elections is a powerful and progressive development, but it can go forward only insofar as it breaks free of the political straitjacket that figures like Mamdani are working to impose upon it. What is required is the political independence of the working class: the building of a mass socialist movement that bases itself not on what is “possible” within the framework of a decaying capitalism, but on what is necessary—the conquest of power by the working class, the expropriation of the oligarchy, and the international reorganization of society.
Workers must understand the seriousness of the situation and draw the necessary political conclusions. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers have already been killed or wounded. Entire cities have been destroyed and millions displaced. Yet the NATO powers, above all in Europe, are not seeking to stop the slaughter. They are escalating it and are prepared to sacrifice hundreds of thousands and even millions more.
The central danger is that the distinction between a proxy war and a direct war between NATO and Russia is being systematically erased. Ukraine’s long-range drone and missile strikes against targets deep inside Russia—energy facilities, military-industrial sites, airfields, ports and infrastructure around Moscow and St. Petersburg—depend on NATO intelligence, satellite surveillance, targeting data, weapons systems and political direction.
The European powers are deliberately pushing Kiev to escalate. They calculate that strikes deep inside Russia will force Moscow to respond and that any Russian retaliation can then be used to justify a still broader NATO intervention. This is the logic of provocation. It is the logic that leads to world war.
The NATO summit in Ankara is being prepared as the next stage in this escalation. The alliance has committed itself to massive increases in military spending, including 5 percent of GDP for defence and broader military-related expenditure by 2035. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte has called for “NATO 3.0,” a “rebooted” alliance in which the European powers take far greater responsibility for war in Europe, “backed by American power.” At the June meeting of NATO defence ministers, the emphasis was on “combat-ready capabilities,” military production and the supply of weapons to Ukraine.
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The escalating war is accompanied by the mobilization of ever more human material for the slaughter. Russia is preparing further mobilizations. Ukraine, bled white by years of war, is desperately trying to replenish its ranks. The European Union, in coordination with Kiev, is moving to exclude from temporary protection in Europe newly arriving Ukrainian men of military age who lack authorization to leave Ukraine. Ukrainian workers and youth who seek refuge from the war are to be sent back as cannon fodder for the front.
Ukraine cannot defeat Russia on the battlefield. Its strategy is therefore to escalate the war to the extreme, provoke Russian retaliation and draw NATO ever more directly into the conflict. Zelensky has approved a campaign of “preemptive” strikes against Russian facilities used for the war, including energy infrastructure, transport systems and military-industrial facilities on the Crimean Peninsula and deep inside Russia.
The political aim of this strategy is not merely to improve Ukraine’s battlefield position, it is to destabilize the Putin regime itself. The European powers and their strategists are increasingly operating on the assumption that they can use Ukraine’s deep-strike campaign, sanctions, attacks on Crimea and military pressure to force Moscow into capitulation or provoke a crisis within the Russian state.
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The escalation against Russia is one front in the global imperialist redivision of the world. The same ruling classes that are driving the war in Ukraine are arming and politically backing the Israeli genocide in Gaza, waging a war of aggression against Iran, and building up their military forces against China in the Indo-Pacific. A third world war is not merely being prepared for the future, it is already unfolding through interconnected fronts in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific. The danger of a direct NATO-Russia war must therefore be understood as part of a global eruption of imperialist violence rooted in the crisis of capitalism.
The fight against the madness of war also requires the rejection of the reactionary policies of the Putin regime. The Russian invasion of Ukraine was not a progressive or anti-imperialist response to NATO encirclement. It was the desperate response of a capitalist oligarchic regime that emerged out of the Stalinist destruction of the Soviet Union and the restoration of capitalism. It has served only to divide the Russian and Ukrainian working class and to provide US and European imperialism with the pretext to massively expand the war.
From the beginning of the war, the International Committee of the Fourth International has fought to unify the workers of Ukraine and Russia in opposition to both NATO imperialism and the Putin regime. In its first statement after the invasion, the ICFI denounced the Russian military intervention and declared: “Despite the provocations and threats by the US and NATO powers, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine must be opposed by socialists and class conscious workers.”
This remains the essential position. The working class can oppose NATO’s war only on the basis of socialist internationalism, not Russian nationalism.
The NATO-backed regime in Kiev is no more democratic than its imperialist sponsors. It has outlawed opposition parties, suppressed independent trade unions, imposed martial law, prolonged Zelensky’s rule beyond the end of his legal mandate and incorporated fascist forces into the state and army. It glorifies the OUN and UPA, organizations that collaborated with Nazi Germany and participated in the Holocaust and massacres of Poles and Jews, while jailing socialist opponents of the war.
The arrest, frame-up and imprisonment in Ukraine for more than two years of Bogdan Syrotiuk, a leading member of the Young Guard of Bolshevik-Leninists, underscores the reactionary character of the war and the NATO-backed regime in Kiev. Syrotiuk has opposed both the Zelensky dictatorship and the war, calling for the unity of Ukrainian and Russian workers against their respective capitalist governments. For this, he has been charged with high treason.
The ICFI and the WSWS are carrying out a global campaign demanding Bogdan Syrotiuk’s immediate and unconditional release. His case expresses the central political issue in the war: the struggle to unite Ukrainian, Russian and international workers against nationalism, imperialism and capitalism.
The danger of a direct NATO-Russia war gives this campaign and this perspective the utmost urgency. Workers in Germany, Britain, France, Poland, Italy, the United States, Russia and Ukraine have no interest in killing one another for the profits and strategic ambitions of their ruling classes. Their common enemy is capitalism, which drives humanity toward war, dictatorship and social catastrophe.
3. Teamsters and Department of Justice move to end federal oversight of union after 37 years
The US Department of Justice and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters filed a joint motion on June 17 to wind down the remaining federal monitorship over the union, nearly four decades after the 1989 consent decree was imposed in the name of combating corruption and organized crime influence.
The filing came immediately after the Teamsters bureaucracy secured another five years in office for General President Sean O’Brien and General Secretary-Treasurer Fred Zuckerman. At the Teamsters’ 31st International Convention in Las Vegas, the O’Brien-Zuckerman slate was “re-elected” after no opposition candidates received enough delegate votes to force a one-member-one-vote election by the membership.
This means that 1.3 million Teamsters were denied the right to vote for the union’s top offices.
This is the context in which O’Brien is claiming that the end of federal oversight proves the Teamsters have entered a “new era” of internal democracy and transparency. “Over the past four years, we have developed a system of internal controls and created a culture of vigilance in our union,” he said. “Our efforts have proven that we can police our own, and the controls we have put in place are more stringent than any labor organization in the country.”
The reality is the opposite. The winding down of the monitorship does not mark the end of corruption inside the union or even a separation between the union bureaucracy and the capitalist state. It amounts to official sanction for the corruption and bureaucratic suppression through which the apparatus polices the rank and file.
Only days later, the federal monitor overseeing the United Auto Workers filed a new report on corruption under UAW President Shawn Fain, including allegations that Fain abused his authority to get perks for his fiancée and retaliated against a rival official. This followed the UAW convention, where the Democratic Socialists of America, Labor Notes and similar defenders of the bureaucracy treated Fain’s appearance as a coronation.
In both the Teamsters and the UAW, federal oversight has not produced workers’ democracy. It has provided a mechanism through which the capitalist state has intervened to stabilize, rehabilitate and regulate corrupt union apparatuses under conditions of growing rank-and-file opposition. The state and the corporations require the services of these apparatuses to contain the class struggle.
O’Brien’s record exposes the fraud of the claim that the Teamsters have been “cleaned up.” Before becoming general president, O’Brien was a longtime factional operative under the administration of James P. Hoffa, the son of the better-known Jimmy Hoffa who ruled the union from 1957 to 1971. In 2013, O’Brien threatened dissident Teamsters in Rhode Island Local 251 who opposed one of his allies, declaring that they had a “major problem” and “need to be punished.” He later served a suspension from union office over the threats.
Since taking office, O’Brien has presided over one betrayal after another. At UPS, where the Teamsters pushed through a contract the bureaucracy hailed as “historic” in 2023, the company is carrying out a deep restructuring plan which has destroyed tens of thousands of union jobs. It eliminated 48,000 jobs in 2025 and announced plans to cut up to 30,000 more operational positions in 2026.
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The origins of the Teamsters’ Mafia connections cannot be separated from the anti-socialist and nationalist politics of the bureaucracy. In the 1930s, Trotskyist militants in Minneapolis played a decisive role in transforming the Teamsters from a narrow craft union into a powerful industrial force. Farrell Dobbs and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party helped organize the 1934 Minneapolis general strike and the over-the-road organizing campaigns that became the foundation of the union’s national power.
Jimmy Hoffa would later admit in his autobiography he had learned important organizing methods from Dobbs, but he rejected his socialist and internationalist perspective. As then-Teamsters president Daniel Tobin, the Roosevelt administration and the federal government moved against the Trotskyist leadership—including jailing 18 leaders under the Smith Act for seditious activity for opposing US entry into World War II—Hoffa emerged as an anti-communist factional fighter within the union.
Hoffa and his allies substituted gangster methods, nationalism and racketeering for the class-struggle perspective that had animated the Minneapolis strikes. Mafia figures were brought into the union apparatus, pension funds were looted and violence was used against both management and internal opponents.
Earlier federal probes of the Teamsters, from the McClellan Committee hearings of the late 1950s to Robert F. Kennedy’s Justice Department campaign against Hoffa in the early 1960s, used real corruption as the pretext for weakening and disciplining what was still a powerful workers’ organization. By 1989, the consent decree functioned more as a state-managed rehabilitation of a discredited apparatus, restoring its credibility while tightening its integration with the capitalist state.
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The end of federal oversight does not mark the end of state integration. It marks a change in form. The apparatus no longer requires the same external supervision because it has been stabilized, consolidated and politically prepared for the struggles ahead. The Teamsters bureaucracy under O’Brien has shown that it can block opposition inside the union, impose sellout contracts, police workers’ anger and align itself with the political needs of the ruling class.
The same lesson emerges from the UAW. The federal monitor there has not produced democracy or accountability. The monitor’s reports have exposed the thuggish factional methods of the Fain administration, while the “reform” milieu around Labor Notes and the DSA has worked to promote Fain as the embodiment of rank-and-file militancy. The nomination of Will Lehman at the UAW convention demonstrated the opposite: that workers are seeking a way to break through the apparatus, not reform it.
The working class must draw the necessary conclusions. The state is not a neutral arbiter of union democracy. Its interventions into the unions are aimed at preserving the apparatus, not abolishing it. Nor can workers rely on “reform” factions that seek positions within the bureaucracy and adapt themselves to its privileges, methods and political alliances.
Restoring power to the rank and file requires not another reshuffling of officials, another supervised election or another appeal to the capitalist political establishment, but a rebellion from below.
4. Geethananda Jayasekera, longstanding Sri Lankan Trotskyist dies at 70
The SEP and the IYSSE in Sri Lanka pay tribute to comrade Geethananda Jayasekera’s struggle for the Trotskyist principles of international socialism and extend our deepest sympathies to his family members.
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The SEP and the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) in Sri Lanka pay tribute to comrade Geetha’s struggle for the Trotskyist principles of international socialism and extend our deepest sympathies to his family members. We will publish an obituary in the coming days.
Workers at Bridgewater Interiors in Warren, Michigan, members of UAW Local 400, voted Tuesday on a four-year contract that the United Auto Workers bureaucracy has sought to rush through without giving workers the chance to see the full agreement or study its details. Despite a concerted UAW effort to exploit the severe economic distress that it has foisted upon the plant’s low-paid workforce—dangling a $2,000 signing bonus and front-loaded pay increases to secure a “yes” vote—workers expressed enormous opposition to the contract in discussions with World Socialist Web Site reporters Tuesday.
In May, the same workers voted down a tentative agreement by a crushing 95 percent margin. Rather than call a strike, the UAW ignored the result, extended the existing contract behind workers’ backs and brought back a slightly modified version with poverty starting wages of $20 an hour, topping out at $29 in four years.
The vote comes just days after Fain and the UAW narrowly rammed through a fourth tentative agreement covering 1,700 workers at Nexteer Automotive in Saginaw, Michigan, where workers had already voted down three previous UAW-backed contracts. Some 3,000 Dana workers at plants in the Midwest and South decisively rejected a tentative agreement last month. The opposition at Nexteer, Dana and Bridgewater is part of a growing rebellion against the UAW bureaucracy by auto parts workers, long the lowest paid union members in the industry.
Supporters distributed hundreds of copies of a WSWS article on the snap vote at the factory gate Tuesday and spoke with workers about the contract. The plant’s workers, who produce seats and interiors for some of the Big Three’s most profitable vehicles, are a highly exploited workforce, many hired through temp agencies and paid so little they cannot afford a car, forced to take buses or Ubers to reach the plant.
One worker walking into the plant told the WSWS, “They’ve got this signing bonus, but they are going to take half of it away with taxes and union dues. It’s hard to save for a car with the wages we’re getting and the other bills we have. That’s why I had to catch a bus in this heat to come to work. I don’t talk to the union, because they don’t do anything to help.”
A worker with three years said of the contract, “I don’t like it. They are taking away our emergency vacation days, and we need them to take care of our families. We want $35 an hour now, not in five or six years.” Another added, “We’re living paycheck to paycheck now, and this contract doesn’t benefit anyone, especially the ones who have been working here six or seven years. We haven’t gotten a raise in years.”
A veteran with 23 years said, “I’m just making $26 an hour. I was here when it was owned by Johnson Controls.” He said the company always brings in new hires right before a contract vote then lays them off after they vote yes.
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The UAW bureaucracy is desperate to prevent a strike that would disrupt the Big Three’s production and profits. Fain is in a de facto alliance with the Trump administration’s trade war policies and increase in military production, both requiring suppression of opposition to skyrocketing living costs, automation-driven job cuts and speedup.
6. Australia: Union trying to rush through sellout deal at Western Sydney University
In typical anti-democratic fashion, the NTEU is trying to push an endorsement vote through a hastily called members’ meeting on Thursday.
7. The 1929–1930 miners’ lockout—a key strategic experience of the Australian working class
The existing accounts of the lockout all put the defeat down to the miners themselves—courageous, but worn down after 16 months of struggle. This article examines the critical role of the Labor Party, the trade unions and the Communist Party in isolating the locked-out miners and finally forcing them back to work on the terms of the coal barons.
8. U.S. Supreme Court narrowly upholds birthright citizenship
By a narrow margin, the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday invalidated President Donald Trump’s executive order issued the afternoon of his second inauguration that would have stripped birthright citizenship from the offspring of parents who are either undocumented or in the United States on temporary visas. The ruling held that the Fourteenth Amendment guarantees citizenship to virtually all persons born in the United States.
The executive order was an authoritarian attack on fundamental democratic principles laid down in the Constitution, in particular, in the three post-Civil War amendments that abolished slavery, ensured citizenship to the former slaves and granted ex-slaves the right to vote. It threatened to strip citizenship from hundreds of thousands of offspring of immigrants, with dire implications extending to the democratic rights of the entire population.
The ruling affirms multiple lower court injunctions against the executive order, including the lead case decided Tuesday, Trump v. Barbara, a class action filed in New Hampshire federal court. An earlier injunction against Trump’s executive order, Trump v. CASA, resulted in a reactionary decision last year that invalidated nationwide injunctions issued by federal courts.
The decision was the last of the current Supreme Court term, which will adjourn until the first Monday in October. Earlier in the day, the court issued reactionary rulings that allow states to discriminate against transgender children in athletics and allow the funding of political candidates with unlimited amounts of “dark money.”
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The fact that four of the nine justices of the Supreme Court, just one short of a majority, reject the common law and constitutional underpinnings of birthright citizenship, and the ideals of the two American revolutions with which they are intertwined, demonstrates the breakdown of bourgeois democracy.
Protecting the fruits of the American revolutions, which are anchored in the egalitarian principle of birthright citizenship, cannot be left to a bourgeoisie driven by the contradictions of capitalism to embrace increasingly dictatorial forms of rule. Today that historic task must be taken up by the working class under its independent banner.
9. Violent attack in Stade, Germany, the product of a brutal society
The violent shooting deaths of six people in the northern German city of Stade have triggered horror far beyond the country’s borders. The victims are four female and two male members of a youth welfare facility and the youth welfare office. According to what is known so far, they had met in a facility that provides shelter for young mothers with children in order to discuss a custody case.
This concerned a three-month-old child who had been separated from its parents. The child was later returned to the mother under conditions she lived with the child in the facility in Stade. The father, who apparently opened fire, had also been asked to attend the meeting. Four victims died at the scene, a fifth during an attempt at resuscitation outside the house, and the sixth shortly afterwards in hospital. The mother and child remained unharmed.
The alleged perpetrator was intercepted and arrested while fleeing the crime scene. He is a 45-year-old man born in Germany with Turkish roots. Also arrested was a 65-year-old woman who drove the getaway car.
In its scale and brutality, the violent attack is reminiscent of the mass shootings that regularly take place in the United States. There, between 15,000 and 20,000 people have been killed by firearms in each of recent years, excluding suicides.
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The political reactions to the violent attack in Stade were predictable: hollow phrases of regret and a return to business as usual. Chancellor Friedrich Merz wrote: 'The news from Stade is deeply shocking.' Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed his thanks to all emergency personnel and doctors. Lower Saxony's State Premier Olaf Lies wrote that the crime left 'the entire state government deeply saddened.'
Not a word of reflection or self-criticism. When conclusions are drawn, they are a call for more police, more surveillance, more repression. As always in such cases, the Turkish roots of the alleged perpetrator are used to stir up racism and strengthen the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD).
Public broadcasters NDR and WDR spread the news that the alleged perpetrator belonged to a large clan in Hanover. So-called. 'Clan crime' is one of the slogans used to whip up agitation against refugees from the Middle East. Even the police and the Lower Saxony Interior Ministry felt compelled to deny it. They were not aware of any clan connection, they stated at a press conference.
10. More than 1,000 Palestinians killed by Israel since Trump announced the Gaza cease-fire
Israeli forces continued killing Palestinians in Gaza and the occupied West Bank over the weekend and into Tuesday. The latest media reports show that there is no cease-fire in Gaza but a campaign of Israeli violence that is continuing under a diplomatic cover provided by the US administration of Donald Trump since October.
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Israeli officials are now openly discussing permanent control, population transfer and renewed settlement activity. The Jerusalem Post reported that Netanyahu said, “voluntary migration” from Gaza remained on the table while he refused to rule out Jewish settlements there, adding: “The question is whether you prefer to do or to talk.”
The Post also reported that earlier discussions about Gaza migration involved the Mossad, and officials were exploring mechanisms to push Palestinians out “voluntarily,” although the paper described the plan as unresolved and contested inside the Israeli system.
Meanwhile, Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said plans for three settlements in northern Gaza had already been completed and were awaiting Netanyahu’s approval. This demonstrates that the goal of the Gaza genocide operation is expansion of settlements and permanent annexation.
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On Monday, The Economist reported that Trump’s much-vaunted Gaza plan has “little to show for itself.” According to the magazine, Israel still occupies most of the strip, while reconstruction has not started. That is a blunt admission that the US-backed diplomatic framework has not resulted in any peace at all.
The collapse of Trump’s plan exposes the emptiness of the public narrative about a “cease-fire” and “peace.” If thousands remain displaced, Israeli forces keep killing, and Israeli leaders keep discussing migration and settlements, then the cease-fire functions as a political cover for the ongoing genocide.
The same pattern is visible in the region, where declarations of a “cease-fire” and a Memorandum of Understanding coexist with ongoing imperialist missile strikes and threats of annihilation. In both Iran and Lebanon, Trump and Netanyahu have used the same modus operandi as that which exists in Gaza, where persistent imperialist violations of the “peace deal” are justified and blamed on those who are the target of their illegal and aggressive wars of conquest.
12. Peter Gabriel: From progressive rock to world music and beyond
Internationally acclaimed musician Peter Gabriel is developing a new album in 2026 entitled o/i (output/input) as a year-long series of track-at-a-time releases timed to arrive with each full moon cycle.
[From a report delivered to a June 25 public meeting of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality at the University of Michigan.]
On June 10, 2026, the FBI carried out coordinated predawn raids across southeast Michigan, Illinois and Wisconsin, arresting seven pro-Palestinian activists at the University of Michigan (U-Mich). An eighth defendant was later identified as being in India. A 63-page indictment, secretly filed on May 20 and unsealed that morning, charged all eight with federal conspiracy offenses carrying penalties of up to 20 years in prison.
The eight defendants were involved in protests against the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, which has killed over 72,000 people according to official figures, though the true toll is far higher. The protesters’ demands included a call for the University of Michigan to divest itself from Israel.
The eight defendants are Zainab Hakim, 23, of Canton Township; her sister Amatullah Hakim, 21, of Ann Arbor; Paige Feyock, 26, of Ann Arbor; Ahmet Korkaya, 28, of Milwaukee; Jonathan Zou, 22, of Ann Arbor; Alexander Sepulveda, 23, of Chicago; Miriam Odeh, 24, of Dearborn; and Colin Weger, 24, of Ann Arbor. They are students, former students, and student employees of the university. Six have now appeared before federal judges in Detroit, entered pleas of not guilty, and been released on bond. Two more await arraignment.
This prosecution is a blatant and dangerous political witch-hunt and frame-up. It must not be allowed to stand. It is a major escalation by the Trump administration of the effort to criminalize left-wing opposition to war, dictatorship and social inequality.
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What is the supposed crime of the U-Mich Eight? The government alleges a “conspiracy to transmit threats in interstate and foreign commerce,” for which all eight face five years in prison. The “interstate commerce” requirement for federal jurisdiction is satisfied purely by the fact that the defendants used modern communications infrastructure—encrypted messaging, social media, photography—to voice their dissent and organize political demonstrations.
The indictment presents as criminal such phrases as “If you aren’t losing sleep after funding mass murder and genocide, then WE WILL WAKE YOU UP”; “We must escalate, mobilize, and organize to demand divestment by any means necessary”; and “Our duty to Palestine is to damage, disrupt, and destroy the colonizers’ operations.” The phrase “by any means necessary” has been used by the labor movement, anti-war coalitions and civil rights campaigners for generations.
There is a witness intimidation charge, a 20-year felony. It is built on the fact that two defendants, Paige Feyock and Zainab Hakim, sat down with a classmate at a public café to determine whether he was cooperating with law enforcement. They concluded he knew nothing and went home. For this, they face two decades in federal prison.
None of the indicted conduct involves physical injury to any person. The allegations of graffiti, property defacement, and minor vandalism would, if prosecuted at all, ordinarily be handled as state-level misdemeanors. Instead, the government has invoked conspiracy statutes and the interstate commerce clause to transform political protest into federal felonies.
This attack is directed not only at supporters of the Palestinian people. It is part of a far broader assault on democratic rights, including First Amendment-protected speech and political advocacy. The same pseudo-legal framework is being used to criminalize political activity across the country.
12. Massive US heatwave threatens millions as 3 firefighters die battling Colorado wildfire
A record-setting heat dome is spreading across the central and eastern United States, threatening millions of workers and their families with deadly temperatures, wildfire smoke, power grid strain and unsafe workplaces.
On Tuesday, the final day of its term, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down two 6-3 decisions, both written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, that further undermine democratic rights and enhance the domination of the corporate oligarchy over the political system. In the first, the court upheld state bans excluding transgender girls from school sports. In the second, it lifted limits on political campaign contributions, making it even easier for the wealthy to dictate public policy.
The five other right-wing justices endorsed Kavanaugh’s opinion while the three moderates—Elena Kagan, Sonya Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson—joined in dissent.
The court ruled that public schools may bar transgender girls from girls’ and women’s sports teams. The decision in West Virginia v. B. P. J., argued together with the Idaho case Little v. Hecox, upholds laws now on the books in 27 states and hands the Republican right another victory in its campaign to ostracize a small and vulnerable segment of the population.
The state bans at issue are solutions in search of a problem. In the B.P.J. case, West Virginia passed the Save Women’s Sports Act before there was a record of any transgender person participating in school sports in the state, much less a wave of transgender students taking the places of female athletes or making them unsafe. In the entire five-year history of the ban, B. P. J. is the only transgender girl publicly identified in the state as seeking to play women’s sports.
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The fostering of fear and hatred toward this numerically minuscule portion of society has only one purpose: scapegoating. The existence of centi-billionaires and even trillionaires—who are the real cause of scarcity and social misery—must be obscured and camouflaged by religious and moralistic appeals.
The same six-justice majority used the final day of the term to gut what remains of the country’s campaign finance laws. In National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, the court struck down the Federal Election Campaign Act’s limits on how much a political party may spend in coordination with its own candidates, and overruled its 2001 precedent, FEC v. Colorado Republican Federal Campaign Committee (Colorado II), which had upheld those limits. Justice Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson.
The decision follows the logical course of cases such as Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and McCutcheon v. FEC (2014)—the methodical demolition of every legal barrier to the direct domination of the financial oligarchy over political life. Where Citizens United unleashed unlimited “independent” corporate spending and McCutcheon removed the aggregate cap on what a single donor can give, this ruling allows donations to a party to serve as de facto donations to a given candidate.
14. Zelensky skips “Ukraine Recovery Conference” after Poland strips him of state honors
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was noticeably absent at last week’s “Ukraine Recovery Conference” held in Gdansk, Poland as a result of escalating tensions between the two right-wing governments over Zelensky’s glorification campaign of the fascist Ukrainian Insurgent Army or UPA.
According to its website, the purpose of the annual Ukraine Recovery Conference is “to bolster international support for the country’s reconstruction as well as catalyze investments for Ukrainian businesses.” Zelensky had regularly attended the previous conferences but resorted to sending Prime Minister Yulia Svyrydenko in his place following the decision of far-right Polish President Karol Nawrocki to strip Zelensky of Poland’s Order of the White Eagle on June 19.
Poland’s highest state honor, the Order of the White Eagle, was first presented to Zelensky by President Andrzej Duda in 2023 as a symbol of alliance between the two nationalist governments. The award had also been presented to former Ukrainian presidents Leonid Kuchma, Viktor Yushchenko and Petro Poroshenko, who all announced on June 20 they would return their honors, in solidarity with Zelensky.
The revocation of the award by Nawrocki has caused significant controversy within the Polish ruling class, which fears a rift between Warsaw and Kiev that could threaten the continuation of the NATO-backed proxy war against Russia. It has yet to achieve any of its aims, yet has killed hundreds of thousands.
In an interview with TVN24, Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski stated that Nawrocki’s decision “was inappropriate, because it humiliated the president of Ukraine personally.”
Polish lawmaker Piotr Fogler returned his own state honor, the Golden Cross of Merit, in protest, stating on Facebook, “I am symbolically returning my decoration to this president in protest against the foolish decision to take the order away from the President of Ukraine, a Ukraine that is fighting.” According to Fogler, Nawrocki is “making a mockery of Poland and all of us.”
Sikorski is closely aligned with US imperialism and speaks for a section of the Polish ruling class that fears a further escalation of the conflict with Kiev could threaten Polish interests in the war against Russia. The husband of anti-communist historian Anne Applebaum, in 2022 Sikorski thanked the United States government for destroying the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, provocatively implying that the Polish government had inside knowledge of the sabotage operation.
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While the UPA is celebrated by far-right nationalists within Ukraine and presented abroad by Ukraine’s imperialist backers as benevolent freedom fighters against both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the UPA was largely composed of former members of the Nazi-allied Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN). Founded originally in 1942, by 1943 the UPA consisted primarily of OUN members, Ukrainian police, veterans of the disbanded Nazi-led Schutzmannschaft battalion 201, or deserters from the infamous Waffen-SS Galicia division. The organization counted between 25,000 and 30,000 partisans and could mobilize up to 100,000 by 1944. Even as the Nazi Wehrmacht was forced to withdraw from Ukraine amidst the advance of the Soviet Red Army, the UPA continued its own murderous campaign against Soviet partisans, Jews and Poles, in hopes of establishing an “independent” and ethnically pure Ukrainian state.
While the role of the UPA has long been a point of controversy between the two nationalist governments, Kiev has ramped up its glorification of UPA and OUN figures in recent weeks as part of the ongoing imperialist proxy war with Russia, a war in which Poland itself plays an essential role. More recently, Zelensky issued a decree at the end of last month naming a current military unit of the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces after the UPA, or more specifically, “Heroes of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army.” According to Zelensky, the goal of employing the UPA name for a modern military unit was “restoring the historical traditions of the national army.”
Zelensky did not explain what “traditions” he was referring to, but in the years 1943–1945 the UPA carried out a murderous campaign in the German-occupied regions of Volhynia, Eastern Galicia, Polesia and Lublin which resulted in the massacre of an estimated 100,000 ethnic Poles. The massacres were part of the UPA’s attempt to weaken Polish control over regions it claimed for its future ethnically pure Ukrainian state.
Apart from ethnic Poles, the UPA troops also murdered Jews, Russians, Armenians and other minorities. At the peak of this campaign of ethnic cleansing, women and children constituted the majority of victims. Ukrainians who had married Polish spouses or opposed the UPA were likewise targeted. According to Grezgorz Rossoliński-Liebe, noted biographer of Stepan Bandera and historian of Ukraine’s far-right, in July 1943 alone UPA forces attacked “520 localities and killed between 10,000 and 11,000 Poles.”
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Whatever the outcome of the dispute between these two nationalist governments, the public conflict underscores that their war alliance against Russia is as fragile as it is reactionary. Yet despite its supposed opposition to the murderers in the UPA, as part of the imperialist proxy war against Russia, Poland continues to serve as the primary international logistics and supply hub for the billions of dollars in western military aid destined for Ukraine. The majority of these weapon transfers—including artillery ammunition, armored vehicles, and rocket systems provided by the US, Canada and various European allies—transit through the Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport in southeastern Poland before moving across the border to Ukraine. Emphasizing that, for now, everything must be subordinated to the joint war effort, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently stated, regarding the controversy, “Co-operation serves the interest of both our states and nations, while conflict serves Moscow’s interests.”
Following the conference in Gdansk, Ukrainian Prime Minister Svyrydenko announced that Ukraine had signed over 160 agreements valued at an estimated $11.7 billion. Included in the agreements were new European Union and World Bank financing, infrastructure investments, and “new partnerships in the defence industry and energy sectors.”
Without a rank-and-file rebellion by doctors against the RDC, a sellout was inevitable. That is the central lesson from the dispute. Doctors showed their willingness to fight, but their struggle was undermined by the absence of an organized opposition to the BMA’s partnership with the government.
16. Free Ukrainian socialist and anti-war activist, Bogdan Syrotiuk!
"Peace for the world! Down with war!"
